Under the future tree
by planet p
Summary: AU; a new spring would come, as it always did. Brigitte’s story, pre-series.


**Under the future tree** by planet p

**Disclaimer** I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

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Though they weren't Italian, and had never visited the island of Cyprus, Biddy's parents had named her older sister Cipriana; Cipri for short. Cipri was slim and lithe like the willows' branches blowing in the breeze of old spring in Grandmother's garden down by the brook, and fair of hair and skin.

Of course, Biddy could only imagine the arms of those willows, for they lived on, in her days, as only stumps of what must have once been ballerina-beautiful trees, dressed in fairy green and with all the element of air's powers of grace and seduction, too. She'd never seen those willows with her eyes, except, sometimes, when she lay down by that rambling stream, bodily upon the earth and ground, she could almost swear she could hear those branches swishing through the air, weaving their magic into the day's changing face; almost feel the stirring of air potions, and those arms, their shadows etched across the insides of her eyelids.

Cipri didn't believe that people could perform magic, magic was the concern of fairies and pixies, she said. But Biddy still liked to think that people could do magic too, with the fairies' and pixies' consent, of course. And she certainly thought that people could feel magic being done, after all, she could it, so why wouldn't there be other people who could too.

No amount of magic nor grief could bring back her sister when she disappeared that spring, though Biddy tried so, so hard. Cipri stayed missing, to the police, as well as to Grandmother's 'eye,' and Biddy stopped believing in magic. The magic had died for Biddy, as surely as Cipri had died for Biddy's parents.

Biddy, of course, refused to give up hope; to give up hope was to give up the earthly homes of our immortal souls, she would chant, whenever she became afraid that Cipri may, indeed, have passed. Her parents grew confused and grief-stricken, then angered, then saddened, then something else. Whatever else it was they turned into whenever Biddy refused to accept what they'd long ago acknowledged, they never looked at her the same. Maybe, even, she stopped being their child a little.

Biddy would wake in the middle of the night some nights, and sneak out of her bedroom, and go down to the little shed, then out into the garden. She'd plant herbs for Cipri under their favourite tree, and imagine the times Cipri and her had sat under the dreaming tree – Cirpri had called it the 'future tree;' you could hear the future, if you closed your eyes and listened very hard, so hard that you even stopped hearing the present – she planted the herbs as an offering to the tree, if only the future would mean the Cipri would come home, and sometimes, when she sat and listened, the rattles and whines of the night would evaporate, and she could again hear Cipri's voice, telling her to rug up, or get on inside. She'd always go back inside then, to bed, on Cipri's words.

In the morning, the herbs would be gone; ripped from their new homes, and tossed into the large wooden box for green, organic wastes. The box was padlocked, but whenever Biddy pressed her ear to the wood – she pretended not to feel the splinters, to shrug away the flinches – she'd hear the herbs inside, screaming as they dried up, as they died. Her mother had pulled them out, and thrown them away, out of sight, to die slowly. Biddy's eyes would well with tears, as they always did, from the splinters, and the cries of the dying plants, and, helpless to stop it, an onslaught of images would come to her.

It was always Cipri, as if it could be anyone else, and she'd been thrown away too, thrown away to die.

At sixteen, Biddy left home. Well, it was more like run away, but she'd not stay in that household any longer, the household that had condemned her sister to death, and in which her mother invited men, whilst her father locked himself in his study, to service her needs – her husband had been unable ever since his eldest daughter's disappearance – the men becoming younger and younger, her father drinking more and more, until one day the young man her mother invited into her rooms was Biddy's boyfriend, and Biddy's father, who'd popped upstairs to spy, drunken as always, and trudged unsteadily back down again to inform Biddy that her boyfriend was upstairs with her mother, and if she'd like, she could leave the scrubbing until after she'd had a good cry, his shoulder was free, if she felt like borrowing it for a sob.

She abhorred to leave her father, especially with the way he was, but when she told him of her plan, loud and angered, that same day her mother had taken her boyfriend to bed, and with a face red and wet, as though sloshed inch by inch in tomato sauce, he nodded and answered that, in that case, he'd be leaving her soon after. She'd be much happier that way, to see him ruined the way she'd promised him she would ruin him all those years ago, before even Cipri had been born. But that was not for her to worry on; she would leave.

So, with her father's blessings, she left home that day. Grandmother had died, years earlier, and she only paused at the garden gate to inform her of her plans, and took one big step out onto the road, and the rest of her life.

In later years, she would become a preschool teacher, and move far across the ocean, to another continent, another country. She would learn that Cipri's disappearance had been, in fact, a kidnapping, and that she'd been taken by a corporation known as the Center.

She would change, then; her flame red hair would become cool and light as Cipri's, and her name would become Brigitte. She would put away her old voice, buried beneath the future tree back home, and become something new, something determined. She would know of Cipri's fate, and she would write one letter by hand, addressed to her father, when she knew, to tell him of his firstborn, her last letter.

What would happen then, was the will of the earth, wind, fire and water; for the plants to hear, and people to wonder at.

A new spring would come, as it always did.


End file.
